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This is the first systematic scholarly study of the Ottoman experience of plague during the Black Death pandemic and the centuries that followed. Using a wealth of archival and narrative sources, including medical treatises, hagiographies, and travelers' accounts, as well as recent scientific research, Nükhet Varlik demonstrates how plague interacted with the environmental, social, and political structures of the Ottoman Empire from the late medieval through the early modern era. The book argues that the empire's growth transformed the epidemiological patterns of plague by bringing diverse ecological zones into interaction and by intensifying the mobilities of exchange among both human and non-human agents. Varlik maintains that persistent plagues elicited new forms of cultural imagination and expression, as well as a new body of knowledge about the disease. In turn, this new consciousness sharpened the Ottoman administrative response to the plague, while contributing to the makings of an early modern state.

The first systematic scholarly study of the Ottoman experience of plague from the late medieval to early modern era

Explores the relationship between plague and the process of state-formation in the early modern Ottoman Empire

Challenges some basic tenets of the field of scholarship, such as that plagues always spread from Ottoman areas to Europe

Awards

Reviews & endorsements

"… a book that tackles and raises major questions about Ottoman history and the hitherto under-studied subject of disease. Much as the subject of plague has been ascribed great importance within the historiography of medieval and early modern Europe, Varlik demonstrates that plague in the Eastern Mediterranean merits consideration as the focal point in the study of the Ottoman Empire and its capital in Istanbul … Whether continuing the study of diseases and their relationship with a transformation polity or exploring how cats became cuddly co-agents in an Ottoman reaction to repeated epidemics, Ottomanist scholars will return to Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World as an important source of new questions in the years to come."
Chris Gratien, The Journal of Ottoman Studies

Customer reviews

10th Mar 2015 by User09150202120255

Very good book in the study of the Ottoman Empire , and I hope that illustrates the impact of the plague on the political relations between Europe and the Ottoman Empire
khaled Wahsh from Egypt

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Product details

Date Published: August 2017

format: Paperback

isbn: 9781108412773

length: 354pages

dimensions: 229 x 152 x 20 mm

weight: 0.524kg

contains: 10 b/w illus. 5 maps

availability: Available

Table of Contents

Part I. Plague: History and Historiography:1. A natural history of plague 2. Plague in Ottomanist and non-Ottomanist historiography 3. The Black Death and its aftermath (1347–1453) Part II. Plague of Empire:4. The first phase (1453–1517): plague comes from the West 5. The second phase (1517–70): multiple plague trajectories 6. The third phase (1570–1600): Istanbul as plague hub Part III. Empire of Plague:7. Plague transformed: changing perceptions, knowledge, and attitudes 8. The state of the plague: politics of bodies in the making of the Ottoman state Epilogue.

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Author

Nükhet Varlik, Rutgers University, New JerseyNükhet Varlik is Assistant Professor of History at Rutgers University, Newark. She is the recipient of an NEH Fellowship by the American Research Institute in Turkey, a Senior Fellowship from Koç University's Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations, and a Turkish Cultural Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship.

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